Distributed event-triggered observer-based tracking control of leader-follower multi-agent systems

In this paper, we consider the exponential leader-following consensus of multi-agent systems with high-dimensional active leader. To ensure the followers can track the leader as well as save the communication resource, a distributed observer-based controller based on periodic event-triggered mechanism is proposed. By using the delay-input method, the underlying leader-following consensus problem of multi-agent systems can be equivalently transformed into the asymptotical stability problem of the time-delay systems. Based on a novel time-delay analysis method, it is shown that the leader-following consensus can be reached. Secondly, to further reduce the amount of signal transmission, an event-triggered mechanism based on quantization is proposed. Thirdly, to remove the limitation that all followers know the system matrix of the leader system, an adaptive distributed observer-based controller is proposed. A numerical example is proposed to illustrate the effectiveness of the obtained result. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V.